Klaviyo Vs Mailchimp: Which Is Better?

When Thinkplus started in 2012, there were only a few email marketing platforms.

Now, there are loads. Maybe too many.

That said, two that always come up in conversations about eCommerce are Mailchimp and Klaviyo.

But which is the best for your eCommerce business? And is there even one right answer?

We’ve got seven different aspects to compare these two email giants on:

At a Glance
Ease of Use
Automation
Integrations
Analytics
Segmentation
Other Features
Pricing
Which Email Marketing Platform Is Right for Your Business?

Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo: At a Glance

In a rush? Here’s how the two platforms measure up across the key areas.

Who Is It for?

Klaviyo is built with eCommerce businesses in mind, but Mailchimp caters to all business types.

Ease of Use

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo are easy to use. It’s easy to navigate the interfaces and the email builders are straightforward on both platforms. They also offer lots of templates to make things even easier.

Automation

The eCommerce email automations in Klaviyo are better than the ones in Mailchimp, but Mailchimp has options for both eCommerce and non-eCommerce businesses, which could be useful.

Integrations

Mailchimp has more integrations overall, but Klaviyo has better, more in-depth eCommerce automations specifically.

Analytics

Klaviyo has very detailed but easy-to-navigate analytics. Mailchimp has more simple analytics, which may be okay for people who don’t like data as much.

Segmentation

Klaviyo’s segmentation is easy to use and offers more flexibility than Mailchimp. Mailchimp does offer segmentation, but it’s not as intuitive and doesn’t offer the same depth as Klaviyo.

Price

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp are fairly priced. There’s not much of a difference between the two.

Want to know more about some or all of these areas? Keep on reading. We’ll be going into much more detail — starting with ease of use.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Ease of Use

We want sending emails to be easy.

There’s nothing worse than having a piece of software you dread using because it’s too complicated.

Because then you won’t use it — and so you won’t get the maximum benefit out of it.

So, which of these two platforms is easiest to use?

Interface

Well, Mailchimp is known for its usability and simplicity, and it has a very straightforward interface.

It’s straightforward to find your way around Mailchimp, and all of the features are pretty logically arranged.

So, if simplicity is your thing, you’ll be fine in Mailchimp.

What about Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is also easy to navigate and looks similar to Mailchimp inside the dashboard.

Now, one thing you’ll notice about Klaviyo is because it’s designed specifically for eCommerce businesses, most of the functionality is very eCommerce heavy.

When you log into the main dashboard, for example, you’re getting eCommerce stats right in your face.

That makes it much easier for eCommerce businesses to see broadly how they’re performing.

Email Builder

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo have incredibly easy-to-use email builders with plenty of templates you can just start plugging your content into.

Mailchimp has a broader range of templates for non-eCommerce businesses because it’s designed for non-eCommerce businesses as well.

Klaviyo’s templates are much more focused on selling and promoting products.

By default, Klaviyo’s templates probably look better, but both platforms will help you build good-looking emails, even if you’re not a coder.

So who wins?

Historically, Klaviyo was much more complex and difficult to use and Mailchimp was primarily designed for simplicity.

While Mailchimp has probably gotten a little bit more complex as it’s added more functionality, Klaviyo has gotten simpler, so they are fairly equal here.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Automation

Every good email marketing campaign uses automation, and most of the email marketing platforms out there today have automation features built in.

The danger with automation features, though, is if they’re too complex, people just don’t use them.

So, which of these platforms has better and more usable automation?

Well, Klaviyo has lots of built-in eCommerce automations, or “Flows”, as they’re called in Klaviyo. You can either build your own from scratch, or you can use one of their pre-built ones.

All of the main eCommerce automations you would expect to see are here — and even some you may not expect.

But you can also get much more granular.

For example, you might not want to offer international customers the same free shipping in an abandoned cart sequence that you offer domestic customers because the cost of fulfilling that shipping will be so much higher.

These are a really good start for an eCommerce business.

Mailchimp also has automations, which they call “Journeys”.

Just like Klaviyo, you can choose some pre-built journeys.

But because Mailchimp isn’t just eCommerce, there’s a much more diverse range of journeys you can choose from.

These don’t just have to relate to email signups; they can be all sorts of things, like integrating Instagram lead ads or promoting live events to people who’ve signed up through Eventbrite.

Now, we’re going to talk about some of the integration capabilities in just a minute. However, given that Klaviyo is designed for eCommerce businesses, the automations right out of the box are far superior.

Mailchimp — because it’s not just designed for eCommerce — has loads of other automation options that might be useful to non-eCommerce businesses.

Again, this feels like a tie. Klaviyo is much better for eCommerce, but Mailchimp is much better for everybody else.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Integrations

Whatever email marketing platform you use, you want it to integrate with the tools and software you already use.

That’s going to save you a bunch of time not having to go between bits of software to update things.

Both of these tools have tons of integrations right out of the box.

You can pretty much integrate Mailchimp with any website platform that you’re using. We’re not going to try and list them all because there are so many.

For anything you can’t integrate natively, you can link to Zapier, which gives you integration with basically every other tool on the planet.

The same is true for Klaviyo, although, as we would expect, Klaviyo’s integrations are much more eCommerce-focused.

Because of that, some of Klaviyo’s integrations with eCommerce platforms, like Magento and Shopify, tend to be much deeper than you’ll get with Mailchimp.

One word of caution. If you’re an eCommerce business, is that some of Mailchimp’s journeys, by default, only work with certain eCommerce platforms.

So, if you use WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento, for example, you won’t get access to some of the journeys designed to work only with Shopify.

Both of these platforms have a ton of integrations, and you can search on their websites to check the apps or software you’re using integrate with them.

On the whole, Mailchimp has more integrations, but Klaviyo has more and better eCommerce integrations.

So again, we’re going to call this a tie.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Analytics

Without analytics, you won’t know whether your emails are hot or not.

If you don’t know whether they’re hot or not, then they’re not.

So, whatever email marketing platform you’re choosing, it has to have great email analytics.

Klaviyo has nailed analytics.

You can start with some overview dashboards, but you can also create custom dashboards to drill into your performance in more detail.

These analytics can be configured to work with any conversion metric you choose. You can compare the relative performance of campaigns and flows, and you can see how much each campaign has contributed.

You can check out the performance of individual campaigns or emails, and Klaviyo will even judge your performance.

It’ll show you some of your top-performing as well as your worst-performing metrics, and it’ll give you a breakdown of email deliverability.

If you want to see pretty much anything else in your analytics, you can do that through a custom dashboard.

Mailchimp’s analytics are a little more simple.

We get some general performance data and a bit of information about how people are moving through our customer journey.

There’s also some audience data about how many subscribers you’ve got and how fast your subscriber growth is happening.

But, this is a clear win for Klaviyo.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Segmentation

Unless you want to annoy and alienate your email subscribers, segmentation is key.

Come to think of it, if you did want to annoy and alienate your email subscribers, segmentation would still allow you to do that even more effectively.

First, a quick primer on what segmentation is for those who don’t know.

Email marketing is built of lists and segments.

A list is like a database of people who have subscribed to your emails.

A segment is a dynamic group of people within a list that meets certain criteria.

Let’s say, for example, you have a list of people who have bought products on your website. You might create a segment from this list and call it “VIP customers”.

These are people who have made five purchases from you in the last six months.

People will come in and out of that segment as they make or don’t make purchases.

You could then send targeted follow-ups to those VIP customers, offering them more incentives to continue purchasing.

That’s why segmentation is important. It allows you to tailor promotions to people based on their behaviours and where they are now.

Klaviyo is built for segmentation.

It allows you to create segments really easily. It’s simple to use and you’ve got loads of different criteria you can build your segments with.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a segment with people who have opened an email from you at least once in the last seven days and live in the city of Bath.

You could create that segment and run a targeted campaign to them saying, “Hey, we’re doing a pop-up shop in Bath this weekend — come and visit us.”

Mailchimp also has segmentation capability, but it’s a little bit confusing and some of the wording and phrasing are unclear.

For example, I can create a segment of “all of my subscribers who have email engagement that is ‘Rarely’.”

“Rarely,” what?

It’s not clear right away what this means.

What it actually means is you can target all your email subscribers who rarely engage with emails. But that’s not obvious right away.

These issues are fairly consistent in the rest of the segmentation tool.

While there appears to be lots of flexibility in Mailchimp’s segmentation, we think it’s much more tricky to get what you want from this tool.

Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo have segmentation, but we’re gonna say Klaviyo is better here.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Other Features

Both of these platforms have a bunch of other features, which are worth mentioning but don’t get their own section.

Both platforms allow A/B testing
Both platforms have SMS in some of their plans, although Mailchimp only offers it in the US. Klaviyo, however, offers it in more locations and includes it in its flows.
Mailchimp has built-in AI features. (But don’t get it for that; right now, they’re not that great.)
Mailchimp has 24/7 customer service, depending on which price package you’re on. Klaviyo has 24/7 customer support by email and 24-hour support by live chat on weekdays.

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp: Pricing

Now we’re on the literal money question. How much do these platforms cost?

If we compare costs at 10,000 email subscribers, we’ll see Klaviyo starts from $175 a month with email only or $190 with SMS as well.

Mailchimp is a little cheaper at only $100 a month for their Essentials plan, going up to $135 for Standard, which gets you a bit more stuff, and then their Premium plan at $350 a month.

The Mailchimp Essentials plan limits you to only four journey points, which most businesses (if you’ve got reasonably sophisticated automations) are going to exceed.

So, we’d suggest thinking about at least the Standard plan or above.

Pricing is pretty difficult to call a winner on.

Neither of these platforms wins necessarily because whoever’s the better value depends on how many subscribers you’ve got.

But to be totally honest, with the value email marketing can bring, particularly with automations, both of these platforms are a no-brainer for the cost.

Which Email Marketing Platform Is Right for Your Business?

How do you decide which email platform is best for your business?

Really, the choice is yours.

But, if we have to call it, Klaviyo is a much better platform if you’re an eCommerce business.

It has everything tailored for eCommerce businesses. The functionality right out of the box is fantastic. With some optimisations and tweaks, this can be a really powerful part of your eCommerce stack.

Klaviyo’s amazing capabilities as an eCommerce automation platform are one of the reasons we are a Klaviyo partner.

But if you’re not an eCommerce business, then Klaviyo doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Mailchimp is a pretty good option and has loads of the automation stuff you would expect.

If you’re still not sure, both platforms offer free trials, so you can give them a go and see which works best for you.